Inception and Ibn 'Arabi

Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 17 [2013], Iss. 2, Art.
10
There are several reasons to support adopting this perspective, ranging from
the trivial (in the final scene, his children are wearing the same clothing and are in
the exact same place and position as the last time he saw them years ago without
having aged a day) and the nitpicky (as many viewers are fond of pointing out, the
laws of the dream technology don’t seem to be consistent. This is to be expected,
because such wonderful absurdities only exist in dreams, as the film itself is fond
of telling us) to the plot-driven (what Cobb and Co. do to Fischer seems similar to
what Ariadne and Co. due to Cobb, take him deep into his subconscious to help
him overcome the trauma of losing a loved one, so that he can return to reality
with a new purpose, having experienced catharsis) and the profound (see the rest
of this essay). But conceivably, one could construct an equally profound analysis
taking a different position. I will just take this one for the purpose of clarity. A
map must have an orientation, so let’s just take North to be “up,” and everything
depicted in the movie to be Cobb’s dream.
Khayāl-The World of Creative Imagination
“Now in a dream, our mind continuously does this, we create and perceive our world
simultaneously and our mind does this so well that we don’t even know it’s happening.”
-Cobb
One of the most important concepts in Ibn ‘Arabi’s writing, which Inception
illustrates beautifully, is a term called khayāl, which scholars translate as
“imagination” or “imaginal faculty” to separate it from the illusory or derogatory
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol17/iss2/10 6
Ogunnaike: Inception and Ibn 'Arabi
connotations of the word “imaginary.” The world of khayāl is imaginary in that it
the same stuff which dreams are made of, but this stuff is real, at least partially so.
For example, most of us spend our lives in this imaginal world, not only during
dreams, but also during our ordinary, everyday lives. When we see a color, or
smell perfume, or feel an itch, our minds/souls are actually creating these
sensations out of physical stimuli. We don’t see electromagnetic radiation with a
700 nm wavelength, we see red. Our minds “imagine” the sensory reality in
which we live, simultaneously creating and perceiving these experiences, much
like how Cobb described the process of dreaming to Ariadne during her first
shared dream. In fact, Ibn ‘Arabi writes that one of the purposes of dreams is to
alert us to this aspect of our existence, writing that “The only reason God placed
sleep in the animate world was so that everyone might witness the Presence of
Imagination and know that there is another world similar to the [everyday]
sensory world.”3
For Ibn ‘Arabi, this imaginal world encompasses all human experience,4 and
the imaginal faculty of ours gives form not only to physical but also metaphysical
realities or archetypes. If you’ve ever written a melody or a poem, or drawn a
picture, you’re already familiar with the magical process of imagination, the
process of giving tangible forms to intangible ideas, concepts, and emotions. This
is the function of the imaginal faculty, to bring together “pure ideas” and
meanings and clothe them in sensible forms. But what of the reality of these
Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2013 7

Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 17 [2013], Iss. 2, Art. 10
things behind their imaginal forms, and what of reality itself? Most of us take
these sensory, imaginal forms to be our reality, and are happy living out our days
in this seemingly solid world. But Ibn ‘Arabi takes a different stance. Quoting
the famous Prophetic tradition, “People are asleep, when they die, they awaken,”
the Sufi master writes,
The world is an illusion; it has no real existence. And this is what is meant by
‘imagination’ (khayāl). For you just imagine that it (i.e., the world) is an autonomous
reality quite different from and independent of the Absolute Reality, while in truth it
is nothing of the sort’…. Know that you yourself are an imagination. And
everything that you perceive and say to yourself, ‘this is not me’, is also an
imagination. So that the whole world of existence is imagination within
imagination.5
Taking the concept of imagination to its logical limit, Ibn ‘Arabi points out
that even our own conception of self is an illusion, an imagination, a dream within
dreams. Imagination isn’t limited to what goes on inside our heads, because even
our heads are “inside our heads” as a part of the imaginal world.6 So we, along
with this world of imagination, are not “an autonomous reality independent of the
Absolute Reality.” Instead, the relationship between imagination and Reality is
like that of a dream to its dreamer. The dream is not the dreamer, but it is not
other than him either. We and the world are not God, but we are not other than
Him either. The whole world, every human life, everything in existence, is but a
part of God’s grand dream. So everything is simultaneously both God and not-
God, Real and unreal.7
This fundamental paradox of identity is the mother of the other
contradictions allowed by imagination. Logical and rational impossibilities are
the par for the course in dreams, and the very nature of the imaginal world which
most of us obliviously inhabit. This world is the land where opposites join, since
imagination is the bridge between the intelligible and the sensible, the spiritual
and the physical, pure meaning and form, the necessary and the impossible, pure
quality and quantity. Ibn ‘Arabi writes,
Imagination is neither existent nor non-existent, neither known, nor unknown,

neither negated nor affirmed. For example, a person perceives his form in a mirror.
He knows for certain that he has perceived his form in one respect and he knows for
certain that he has not perceived his form in another respect…He cannot deny that he
has seen his form, and he knows that his form is not in the mirror, nor is it between
himself and the mirror…Hence he is neither a truth-teller or a liar in his words, “I
saw my form, I did not see my form.8
Interestingly, however, Ibn ‘Arabi doesn’t despair of ever escaping this
maze of dreams or even advocate looking for reality in another world, nor does he
give up on the idea of reality altogether; rather, he employs the metaphor of the
dream to explain that the various imaginal forms that comprise our ordinary
reality are not groundless fantasies, but are like dreams which can be interpreted.
Commenting on the above-cited tradition, that “people are asleep and when
they die, they awaken,” Ibn ‘Arabi writes, “the Prophet called attention by these
words to the fact that whatever man perceives in this present world is to him as a
dream is to a man who dreams, and that it must be interpreted.”9 Just as our
dreams present us with obscure images and dramatizations of events and feelings,
the dream of our lives presents us with feelings, images, events, which can be
interpreted to understand their origin and significance. Inception illustrates this
point numerous times throughout the film, most recognizably when Cobb is

dunked in a bathtub, causing a flood in the dream world, when Yusuf’s full
bladder causes a rainstorm when they first break into Fischer’s mind, or when
Edith Piaf’s “Non, je regrette rien” echoes through the dream worlds (more on
this later). Cobb’s crew, being seasoned dream travelers, have no trouble
interpreting these various phenomena, that is, inferring their causes in higher
levels of reality from their effects down in the dream. The same is true for Ibn
‘Arabi. One of the terms Ibn ‘Arabi uses for interpretation, ta’wīl, literally means
to bring back to the first or origin, and this term is often paired with khayāl as
complementary arcs of ascent and descent to and from reality:
The Real
Interpretation, ta’wīl, Imagination, khayāl,

“waking up” “dreaming”
dream
So for Ibn ‘Arabi, everything in the world is a symbol, a reflection or “projection”
of the Real (al-Haqq, one of the 99 names of God in Islam). Just as the dream
worlds of Inception are populated by projections of the dreamer, the imaginal
world we commonly call real is populated by the “projections,” what Ibn ‘Arabi
calls tajālliyāt, self-manifestations or self-disclosures, of the Real. Each illusory
appearance in the world is, in truth, a projection, an appearance of the Real. He
writes, “The world of being and becoming is an imagination, but it is, in truth,
Reality itself.” 10 Just as a dream is nothing but a mode of the dreamer’s
consciousness, the dream world we call “reality” is nothing but a particular mode
of the Real. In this way, God “dreams” the world and all of us, and it is up to us
to interpret our way back from illusory appearances to the Divine Reality.
The Hierarchy of Reality and Interpretation
“Because it’s never just a dream, is it?”

-Cobb
This concept of interpretation implies the existence of multiple levels of
reality and a relationship between these levels. The notion of a hierarchal reality
is a particularly strange and difficult one for modern audiences to grasp, but
Inception deftly illustrates this point with its different dream levels, each of which
depends on the former and is intimately connected with it.11 These connections
are what allow for interpretation, the conceptual movement from a lower dream
level to a higher one. For example, this relationship between levels allows
Cobb’s team to interpret the gravity shifts and rain in the hotel dream level as
being due to Yusuf’s driving. It is significant, even if accidental, that this
character shares his name with the Prophet Yusuf (the Biblical Joseph) famed for
his ability to interpret dreams. Ibn ‘Arabi uses the Qur’anic account of Yusuf to
explain his theory of imagination and interpretation. As a young child, Yusuf had
a dream of the sun and moon and eleven stars bowing down to him. Years later,

when he had become a “mighty prince” in Egypt and his eleven brothers came to
beg food from him during a time of famine, Yusuf remarked, “This is the
interpretation (ta’wīl) of my dream of long ago. My Lord has made it true!”12 Ibn
‘Arabi clarifies the meaning of this last sentence:
It means: ‘God has made to appear in the sensible world what was in the past in the
form of imagination’. This implies that the realization or materialization in a sensible
form of what he had seen in a dream was, in the understanding of Joseph, the final
and ultimate realization. He thought that the things left the domain of ‘dream’ and
came out to the level of ‘reality.’13
However, given his understanding of imagination, Ibn ‘Arabi asserts that
both Joseph’s “dream” and its fulfillment in “reality” are simply the same event
manifesting itself in different modes or levels of imagination. Given that both
events were sensible, they are both the products of imagination and cannot be
fully called “real” or “true.” He contrasts Yusuf’s statement with the position of
the Prophet Muhammad that life itself is a dream. From this perspective, Yusuf’s
interpretation has only taken him from one level of dreaming to another. He
dreams a dream, and then wakes into another dream, or more precisely, he dreams
that he awakens in this dream level that is his life. Then he interprets his dream,
or rather, he dreams that he interprets his dream. When his brothers prostrate
before him, he thinks his dream has come ‘true,’ and that he is now outside of his
dream; but unbeknownst to him, he is still dreaming. Al-Kāshānī, a prominent
commentator on Ibn ‘Arabi explains:
The difference between Muhammad and Joseph in regard to the depth of

understanding consists in this. Joseph regarded the sensible forms existing in the
outer world as ‘reality’ whereas, in truth, all forms that exist in imagination are (also)
sensible without exception, for imagination (khayal) is a treasury of the sensible

things. Everything that exists in imagination is a sensible form although it actually is
not perceived by the senses. As for Muhammad, he regarded the sensible forms
existing in the outer world also as products of imagination (khayaliyah), nay even as
imagination within imagination. This because he regarded the present world of ours
as a dream while the only ‘reality’ (in the true sense of the word) was, in his view,
the Absolute revealing itself as it really is in the sensible forms which are nothing but
so many different loci of its self-manifestation. This point is understood only when
one wakes up from the present life which is a sleep of forgetfulness after one dies to
this world through self-annihilation in God.14
Yusuf is not the only name in Inception with significant symbolism,15 the
young architect Ariadne who serves as Cobb’s guide through the dark depths of
his psyche, shares her name with the mythical Minoan princess who helped rescue
Theseus from the Minotaur’s labyrinth by giving him a spool of golden thread.
She held one end while Theseus carried the other through the maze, so that after
slaying the minotaur, he could find his way back out. This is precisely what
Ariadne does in Inception, she guides Cobb through his labyrinth of dreams. She
(or Cobb’s projection of her, depending on how you look at it) follows Cobb all
the way to the depths of limbo where Cobb confronts and defeats his projection of
his wife, and reminds him to return to their “reality” up above. Throughout the
dream journey, she helps guide and tether him to “reality” across the different
levels of the dream.
The Edith Piaf song, “Non Je Regrette Rien” also crosses all of the dream
levels of the movie, tying them together and literally serving as the point of
connection and transition from one dream level to the next. The theme echoes
through the different levels of the dream, calling the dreamers back to “reality”

and preparing them for the transition up to the next dream level by counting down
to the “kick.” For Ibn ‘Arabi and his school, everything, at all levels of existence,
is like this haunting music. To quote Toshihiko Izutsu, one of the foremost
experts on Ibn ‘Arabi,
Anything that is found at the lowest level of Being, i.e., the sensible world, or any
event that occurs there, is a ‘phenomenon’ in the etymological meaning of the term;
it is a form (sūrah) in which a state of affairs in the higher plane of Images directly
reveals itself, and indirectly and ultimately, the absolute Mystery itself. To look at
things in the sensible world and not to stop there, but to see beyond them the ultimate
ground of all Being, that precisely is what is called by Ibn ‘Arabi ‘unveiling’ (kashf)
or mystical intuition. “Unveiling” means, in short, taking each of the sensible things
as a locus in which Reality discloses itself to us. And a man who does so encounters
everywhere a ‘phenomenon’ of Reality, whatever he sees and hears in this world.
Whatever he experiences is for him a form manifesting an aspect of Divine Existence,
a symbol for an aspect of Divine Reality. And in this particular respect, his sensory
experiences are of the same symbolic nature as visions he experiences in his sleep. In
the eyes of a man possessed of this kind of spiritual capacity, the whole world of
‘reality’ ceases to be something solidly self-sufficient and turns into a deep
mysterious forêt de symboles, a system of ontological correspondences.16
The music in Inception illustrates these correspondences beautifully through
the manipulation of the Edith Piaf song into the distinctive theme music of the
17
movie. This effect is far easier to experience than to explain (see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVkQ0C4qDvM). The discerning listener
can hear or recognize the original throughout nearly the entire soundtrack, which
itself becomes a kind of “forest of symbols”. The soundtrack is to the Edith Piaf
original what a dream is to the dreamer, what the “phenomenon” is to the Reality;
the latter is the ground from which the former is derived. Similarly, a person of
“unveiling” à la Ibn ‘Arabi can recognize aspects of the Reality throughout the
“soundtrack” of sensible forms that constitute his life.18
In the Sufi tradition, music is understood to recall man back to his
primordial and eternal state of being with God, before the creation of time and
space. Sufi poets and authors link music to two moments of Divine speech
described in the Qur’an: 1) the “call-and-response” covenant of alast (7:172) in
which God asks the souls of all humankind, “Am I not your Lord?”, to which they
reply in the affirmative, and 2) the verbal creative command “Be!” by which God
brings all things into being.19 Both of these utterances are understood to have
taken place in eternity, outside of space and time, prior to the creation of the
world. For many Sufis, earthly music calls us back to this eternal state, our
original reality, much as Piaf’s haunting melody calls the dreamers back to their
“reality.” Ibn ‘Arabi writes, “Thus when the singer sings, the one worthy of
samā‘ (listening) sees God’s speech ‘Be!’ to the thing before it comes to be.”
Music allows the mystic, in the words of William Blake, “To see a World in a
Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your
hand, And Eternity in an hour.”
Time
“Five minutes in the real world gives you an hour in the dream.”
-Arthur
This temporal aspect brings us to another feature shared by Inception and
Islamic cosmology (and most traditional cosmologies in general). In the film,

Cobb explains to Ariadne that, “In a dream, your mind functions more quickly, so
time seems to feel more slow,” and this effect is compounded in the dreams
within dreams. All of this is reminiscent of the Biblical, “A thousand years in
your sight are but as yesterday when it is past…”20 and “one day is with the Lord
as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”21 The Qur’an similarly
recounts, “A day with your Lord is equivalent to a thousand years in the way you
count," and describing the questioning of souls after the resurrection, "He will say,
'How many years did you tarry on the earth?' They will say, 'We tarried there for a
day or part of a day. Ask those able to count!' He will say, 'You only tarried there
for a little while if you did but know!”22 The fundamental idea underlying this
cosmological feature is that since Reality is eternal, i.e. is situated outside of time,
time is an inherent aspect of the dream world of illusion. As one goes deeper into
the dream world, away from Reality, time becomes more intense, and as one
“awakens” towards Reality, time fades away with the rest of the dream, so that
after death, life will seem a fleeting dream of “a day or part of a day.”
Inception also brilliantly illustrates the close association between death,
resurrection and awakening alluded to above. The almost-apocalyptic scenes of
collapsing dream levels in which the whole world is literally falling down around
the dreamers recall the poetic accounts of apocalypse found in the Qur’an where
the “sky is cleft asunder” or the “heavens are rolled up like a scroll,” the
mountains “fly hither and thither” like “carded wool” and are “crushed to powder”
and “scattered like dust,” “vanishing like a mirage,” while the oceans “boil over”
and “burst forth.” This cataclysmic destruction leads to awakening onto a higher
dream level, what is called in Islamic terms, the akhīrah or afterlife. The dream
levels of Inception illustrate a fundamental aspect of Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrine of the
afterlife, namely that it does not exist “after” our life, but rather “above” it. The
afterlife does not only exist in the future, it also exists here and now, on another
level of reality. In fact the relationship between the afterlife and our everyday life
is described in pretty much the same terms as that between a dream and the dream
within that dream. Mulla Sadra, a prominent philosopher of Ibn ‘Arabi’s school,
writes, “As for forms which exist in the Afterlife, they are things potent with
existence and intense in effects. Their relation to worldly forms is like the relation
of sensory forms to existent forms in sleep, among which are the remnants from
the impressions of sense-intuition and the storehouses of imagination.”23 That is,
the things we experience in our everyday life are but shadows and reflections of
the realities of the afterlife, not the other way around. We ourselves are but
shadows or reflections of our selves in this afterlife.24 This life is a dream within
the dream of the afterlife, and the things that are happening to us “there” filter
down into our dream lives “here,” much like the action and music in the different
dream levels of Inception.
Aside from the music, a number different images and thematic phrases and
motifs cascade through the different dream levels of Inception.25 Most obviously,

Saito’s wound, sustained in the taxicab, slowly emerges in the hotel dream level,
and trickles down to the hospital dream level, eventually killing and sending him
into limbo. Moreover, fugues of phrases such as, “Do you want to take a leap of
faith, or become an old man filled with regret, waiting to die alone,” emerge in
different characters’ voices at different levels of the dream, again illustrating the
symbolic web of correspondences between levels of reality in Ibn ‘Arabi’s
metaphysics. Like the music, these phrases guide Cobb and Saito back through
the maze of dreams back to their “reality.” This same fugal structure appears not
only in phrases, but also in plot lines. As alluded to above, Cobb’s descent into
limbo to confront his projection of his dead wife mirrors Fischer’s guided journey
through the dream levels to confront his projection of his dead father. These
confrontations lead to catharsis for both characters, which allows them to come to
terms with the death of their loved one, giving them a new orientation to deal with
the legacy of the departed.
But there is also a dark side to his cascade of images and sounds. The
very creative principle which brings dreams into being becomes the seductive,
gravitational pull of illusion when echoed through the different levels of the
dream. The old man in Yusuf’s dream lair explains those who have become
addicted to dreaming, “They come to be woken up…The dream has become their
reality… who are you to say otherwise?” This sentiment is echoed by Cobb’s
projection of Mal, “Admit it, you don’t believe in one reality anymore. So choose.
Choose to be here. Choose me.”
Mal as Maya/hijāb
“So certain of your world. Of what's real…No creeping doubts?”

-Mal
“I can’t imagine you with all your complexity with all your perfection, all your imperfection.
Look at you, you’re just a shade, you’re just a shade of my real wife,
and you’re the best I can do, but I’m sorry, you’re just not good enough”
-Cobb
For me, Mal is the most interesting character in Inception, embodying the
ambiguities, contradictions, and mystery of imagination on which the film is
based. We never actually meet Mal, only encountering Cobb’s projections and
recollections of her. Her love for Cobb is both liberating and enslaving,
simultaneously calling Cobb out of the dream world he thinks is real (remember I
take the position the Cobb is dreaming the whole time and we never actually see
the “real” world) and dragging him deeper into illusion. In this aspect, Mal is a
wonderful embodiment of Ibn ‘Arabi’s conception of the veil (hijāb) and the
shadow. A veil, by its very nature, hides that which it veils, but it can also reveal
that which it hides. Imagine that there’s an invisible man in your room, how
could you possibly discover what he looks like? If you were to throw a sheet over
him, all of a sudden, the basic outline of his form would become apparent, while
the sheet would still cover and conceal him.

This is the dual nature of the hijāb or veil, it simultaneously reveals and
conceals, in fact, its revelation is its concealment. Returning to the concept of
khayāl, the creative imagination through which the Real clothes itself in sensory
forms, we can see how the whole imaginal world, indeed all of existence, is
comprised of these veils which conceal and reveal the Real. But remembering
that the dream is not other than the dreamer, it becomes clear that these veils are
not other than the reality they veil! As a famous Sufi aphorism puts it, “Behold
what shows you His Omnipotence, (may He be exalted): it is that He hides
Himself from you by that which has no existence apart from Him.”26 But we
ourselves are veils of imagination, having “no existence apart from” the Real. So
(paraphrasing Ibn ‘Arabi) the Real hides itself from itself (us), by what is not
other than itself (veils of imagination).
Ibn ‘Arabi derives these insights from the famous “hadith of the veils,” a
prophetic tradition which says, “God has seventy”—or—“seventy-thousand veils
of light and darkness; were they to be removed, the Glories of His Face would
burn away everything perceived by the sight of His creatures.”27 The “light” of
these veils is their manifesting, revelatory aspect, and the “darkness,” their
concealing nature. Without these veils of imagination, God would be completely
unknowable, since we would be blinded by the brilliance of His Reality, or more
accurately, we wouldn’t even exist since we ourselves are these veils.
Commenting on this hadith, Ibn ‘Arabi writes, “We see only that Thou art thyself
the veils. That is why the veils are also veiled and we do not see them, though
they are light and darkness. They are what Thou hast named Thyself, the
‘Manifest’ and the ‘Nonmanifest’… So Thou art the veil. We are veiled from
Thee only through Thee, and Thou art veiled from us only through Thy
manifestation.”28
But what does all of this have to do with Mal? A quick look at her first
scene in the movie should be informative in this regard. We first encounter Mal
in the Japanese palace where Cobb and Arthur are trying to steal Saito’s secrets.29
Cobb has her sit on a chair to anchor him while he rappels out of a window to
another floor of the palace, commanding, “Stay where you are Mal.” Mal smiles
and gets up out of the chair, letting Cobb fall. In this scene, Mal literally tethers
Cobb to a higher level as he descends, symbolizing her role in connecting her
husband to reality as he dives into dreams. However, she is also unreliable; Cobb
says, “I can’t trust you anymore,” before he does trust her by tying himself to her.
Her suicide which uproots Cobb’s life is foreshadowed or echoed (depending on
your frame of reference) in this scene when she playfully gets up from the chair
and leaves, letting Cobb fall.
The suicidal Mal is calling to Cobb from above to escape from his dreams
and join her in reality, while his projection of Mal is calling to him from below to
join him in illusion. They are like mirror images of each other, concealing and
revealing the truth from and to Cobb “that this world is not real.” The projection

of Mal tries to convince Cobb that his reality isn’t real in hopes of getting him to
abandon reality and stay with her in limbo, while the suicidal Mal tried to
convince Cobb that his reality wasn’t real to get him to join her “up above” on the
other side of death. Both Mal’s tell him his ordinary world is not real, one asks
him to transcend it, the other asks him to flee deeper into the illusion.
In the Christian world, this dual feminine principle is represented by the
pairing of Eve (she who births sin/illusion) and Mary (she who births salvation
from sin/illusion), and in the dharmic world of Hinduism and Buddhism, by the
single term, Maya. In the words of one contemporary scholar of comparative
religion:
Maya is…often rendered as “universal illusion”, or “cosmic illusion”, but she is also “divine
play”. She is the great theophany, the “unveiling” of God “in Himself and by Himself” as the
Sufis would say. Maya may be likened to a magic fabric woven from a warp that veils and a
weft that unveils; she is a quasi-incomprehensible intermediary between the finite and the
Infinite – at least from our point of view as creatures – and as such she has all the multi-
coloured ambiguity appropriate to her part-cosmic, part-divine nature.30
Mal is Maya, imagination personified, the creative feminine principle
which brings the world into being, but in so doing, introduces illusion and evil.
Mal’s name literally means “evil” in French, which, aside from being a
convenient anagram for “veil,” is the necessary consequence of the creative
process of manifestation, which unveils and veils.31 Light cannot project without
shadow.
Along with dreams/imagination, the shadow is one of Ibn ‘Arabi’s favorite
symbols of this principle, and it is also stunningly depicted by Mal, of whom
Cobb eventually says, “you’re just a shade.”32 In addition to being attached to
Cobb like his shadow, haunting him through all of his dreams, Nolan’s
cinematography frequently shadows half of Mal’s face. “Shade,” “phantasm” or
“mirror image” is actually the everyday meaning of the term khayāl, and in the
same chapter of his Ringstones of Wisdom where he discusses Yusuf and
dreams/imagination, Ibn ‘Arabi describes shadows in nearly identical terms,
Know that what one calls ‘other than the Real’ and which is referred to as ‘the world’
is, in relation to the Real, as a shadow is to an object. It is the shadow of God. …
The world is known to the extent that the shadows are known, and the Real is
unknown to the extent that the object that casts the shadow is unknown…. For this
reason we say that the Real is known to us in one respect, and unknown in another.33
In fact, mirroring his statement about the purpose of dreams, Ibn ‘Arabi writes,
“God did not create the shadows…except to serve as an indication for you of you
and of Him, so that you may know who you are, what your relationship is to Him,
and what His relationship is to you.”34 A shadow cannot exist without its object,
it takes the form of its object, and it cannot separate from its object. As Cobb’s
shadow, Mal repeatedly begs him to remain with her, pleading, “you promised
we’d be together.” But “the property of shadows is to disappear, not to remain
immutable,”35 the Andalusian sage writes. Just as Mal won’t stay in the chair, the
“real” Mal disappears from Cobb’s life, indicating the “shadowy” and
impermanent nature of the world they shared, and leaving him with nothing but
her totem and his guilt to guide him home.

Mal’s final scene is also particularly philosophically and emotionally
poignant. At the bottom of the dream world, she scoffs at Cobb’s simple notion
of reality, and, echoing many hierarchy-denying modern and post-modern
philosophical trends,36 pleads with Cobb to give up his metaphysical notions of a
reality apart from what he sees around him. This presents a number of profound
philosophical questions. If you could enter a virtual world like The Matrix or
Nozick’s Pleasure Machine, where you could experience anything and everything
you ever wanted, would you? Would you leave? What would distinguish this
reality from your old one? What makes one reality better than another? What
makes one “more real” than another? Is “more real” also better?
In the film, Cobb’s guilt at causing his wife’s suicide acts as a kind of
“inner wakefulness,”37 to borrow a term from Sufism. It is this force, a kind of
metaphysical buoyancy, that propels his rise from illusion to reality and gives him
direction. In Cobb’s words, “and no matter what I do, no matter how hopeless I
am, no matter how confused… that guilt is always there, reminding me of the
truth.”38 If Cobb is a diver lost deep in a sea of dreams, his guilt is the buoyancy
that distinguishes up from down. But in the end, it is Cobb’s intimacy with and
love for his real wife and children that helps him recognize and reject his
projections as unreal, escaping the downward pull of Mal and Maya. The same
love that eventually pulls Cobb out of limbo and orients him throughout his exile
in dreams also threatens to trap him in these illusions. This is the ambiguous,
ambivalent nature of the beauty of the world/Maya/Mal, and the love that attaches
itself to this beauty. Insofar as this beauty is transparent and points beyond itself,
love for it is liberating; but insofar as it is opaque and veiling, this love is
imprisoning. Cobb’s love for his family could either lead him back to them, or
leave him wrecked in the dreams which hold their reflections, like a bird crashed
on a window.
This last point about love is also highly significant, because for Ibn ‘Arabi,
love is the force which causes the Real to dream the world into existence in the
first place. Moreover, the reflection of this primordial love is the longing love we
shadows have to return our source. He writes, “Motion is always the motion of
love…. The motion which is the world’s existence is the motion of love. The
Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, called our attention
to this by relating ‘I was a hidden treasure and loved to be known.”39 Were it not
for this love, the world would not have been manifest in His Identity.”40 The sage
also writes, “None but God is loved in existent things. It is He who is manifest
within every beloved to the eye of every lover—and there is nothing which is not
a lover. So all the cosmos is a lover and beloved, and all of it goes back to
Him.”41 Love is quite literally what makes the world go round and round in the
arcs of imagination outlined above.
The perpetual motion engendered by this love is another characteristic of
the world of imagination, symbolized by Mal’s perpetually spinning top. All

imagination, which is to say everything but the Absolute Reality, is in a state of
constant flux and transformation like waves upon the sea. Ibn ‘Arabi writes,
All of this—praise be to God—is in actual fact imagination, since it never has any
fixity in a single state. But “people are asleep,” and the sleeper may recognize
everything he sees and the presence in which he sees it, “and when they die, they
awake” form this dream within a dream. They will never cease being sleepers, so
they will never cease being dreamers. Hence they will never cease undergoing
constant changes within themselves. Nor will that which they see with their eyes
ever cease its constant changing. The situation has always been such, and it will be
such in this life and the hereafter.42
The film’s final scene recalls many of the Qur’an’s descriptions of the
Paradisal hereafter and underscores its imaginal nature. Cobb’s reunion with his
children on the lush green lawn where he first left them echoes the Qur’an
repeated descriptions of paradise as “a return” and “a Garden” wherein one’s
desires will be fulfilled. In reference to the Qur’anic verse, “’You shall have
within it [the Garden] whatever your souls desire [tashtahī, a verbal form of
shahwa, ‘passion’]’ (41:31). He [Ibn ‘Arabi] takes this Qur’anic verse as a
declaration of the ontological state of the Garden, where ‘imagination’ rules.
Whatever a person desires—whatever his ‘passion’ seeks—that is given to
him….”43
Cobb desired reunion with his family more than anything else, and so that
was his garden. But given that the Garden is yet another veil of imagination, it is
not fixed, but rather an evolving part of the soul’s voyage of self-discovery.
Commenting on the Quranic verse enter my garden, (89:30) Ibn ‘Arabi writes,
“Enter my garden, which is My veil. ‘My Garden is naught else but thee…’.
When you enter His Garden, you enter yourself and know yourself….” 44
Elsewhere he comments, “Among the most wondrous of things is that one is
always ascending, though not aware of it due to the subtleness and fineness of the
veil, and due to the resemblance of forms, spoken of in His Words, And they shall
be given its like.” 45 Even at the end of the film, Cobb’s journey continues,
although he may not be aware of this fact due to the similarities between his home
and children when he first fled and when he returned. Or rather, had he realized
that his children hadn’t aged a day and were wearing the exact same clothes as
when he left, he could have realized that he was not simply going back home, but
being “given its like” on his perpetual ascension through imagination to the Real.
The ambiguous ending of the film, with the famous wobbling top,
suggests that Cobb may not have escaped the dream, and according to Ibn ‘Arabi,
this is not necessarily a bad thing. Both Heaven and Hell, both this life and the
next, are woven from imagination because everything other than the Real itself is
imagination. So as long as Cobb exists as someone or something other than the
Real, the world he inhabits will always be a dream world of imagination.
According to Ibn ‘Arabi, the dreamer ascends through these imaginal worlds
perpetually, even if he, like Cobb at the end of the film, is unaware of his
ascension. Spun by love, the top of imagination never stops spinning, the dream
world keeps on turning, and we, like Cobb, will keep dreaming even after we’ve

awoken. The world of imagination is perpetual and infinite like the tunnel of
mirrors Ariadne creates on the bridge.
The Double Mirror
Ariadne: Who are these people?
Cobb: They’re projections of my subconscious.
In our ordinary life, we are vouchsafed a few visions of infinity: the
unfathomable depth of the night sky, the vast expanse of an ocean or desert, and
the mysterious corridor of two mirrors facing each other. This latter image
appears throughout the film, on the bridge in Ariadne’s imagined Paris and in the
hotel elevator, where Eames (disguised as a blond woman) flirts with Saito. This
spectacular image summarizes, perhaps better than any other, the fundamental
mystery of the film, and of Ibn ‘Arabi’s unique perspective on the relationship
between God, man, and the universe.
The very appearance of the infinite cascade of mirrors within mirrors is a
perfect model of the levels of imagination that make up the film and Ibn ‘Arabi’s
cosmology. A reflection in a mirror is not the same as the object it reflects, but
like the dream or the shadow, it is not other than this object either. Moreover,
each mirror-frame in this infinite tunnel is invisible in itself, but derives its
appearance from the reflections of the images which appear in its framing mirror,
which itself only contains the reflections of the images in its framing mirror…ad
infinitum. Similarly, for Ibn ‘Arabi, each world or level of reality is but the image
or reflection of the world above it. Everything that appears in the sensory world is
but a reflection, on that level, of the images of the archetypal world, and these
images are in turn merely reflections of realities in higher levels of
existence…going all the way back to the Real itself. The image of the Real is
reflected and reduplicated through the different levels of mirrors just like the
images of Cobb and Ariadne between the mirrors. Similarly, the images from
Cobb’s imagination (the open window of the Cobbs’ anniversary suite, the
crouching, laughing children, the sound of the breaking champagne flute) are
reflected through all the dream levels along with Edith Piaf’s music, much like the
various appearances of the Real.
But for Ibn ‘Arabi, the metaphor of the double mirror goes even deeper,
revealing the reason for creation and the limits of human knowledge. The
Andalusian sage begins his most famous work, The Ringstones of Wisdom, with a
discussion of the origin of creation. He writes that “the vision a thing has of itself
in itself is not like the vision a thing has of itself in another thing, which is like a
mirror for it,”46 explaining that “in the beginning,” the Real saw itself in itself
without any other thing, without any subject-object relation. This kind of “seeing”
is difficult to understand, but can be compared to our most basic and simple self-
consciousness, not our awareness of an object, not our awareness of our own
awareness, not even our awareness of ourselves as an object, but rather, simple,

pure consciousness. Hindu sages call this unrestricted mode of consciousness
Atman, and claim that something like it is experienced during deep sleep.
However, this seemingly unqualified and unrestricted mode of
consciousness or seeing is actually qualified by the fact that it is unqualified,
restricted by its being unrestricted. That is, the unlimited nature of this kind of
vision is, in fact, a kind of limitation since it is not limited vision. The vision a
thing has of itself in itself is not like that it has in another. So the Real wanted to
see itself not just in an unqualified, but also in a limited way, as an object in a
mirror. To this end, the Real brought the universe into being, as a mirror in which
to contemplate itself.
Now, mirrors can be polished or clouded; when clouded, you see the mirror
(or rather the dirt on the mirror) and barely see the reflection, but when the mirror
is polished, the reflection is what you see. The polish of the mirror is what makes
the reflection visible in it. Ibn ‘Arabi explains that the universe was created “like
an unpolished mirror,” but “the situation demanded that the mirror of the world be
clear, and Man (literally “Adam”) was the very clearness of this mirror.” Man is
what makes the universe visible to the Real, which is, after all, the former’s
raîson d’être. Ibn ‘Arabi clarifies this relationship in other terms, “In relation to
the Real, man is like the pupil in relation to the eye, through which vision occurs;
one calls this the faculty of sight. For this reason he is called Man [the word for
“man” in Arabic, insān, also means pupil], and through him the Real looks upon
His creation and shows mercy upon them.”47 Of course, we have to remember
that the mirror of the universe, along with its human polish, is not other than the
Real, they are only an imagined form.
All of this may seem very confusing, and it should be, but this is precisely
where Inception can hopefully help polish and clarify things. If we take the
whole movie to be one big dream of Cobb’s, then all of the characters, events,
images, etc. are Cobb; they are nothing other than aspects of his character or
personality imaginalized into different forms. Mal could be his guilt, Eames his
playful side, etc. But who is the Cobb of the dream world? Although, like
everything else in the dream, he is entirely a product of the sleeping Cobb’s
imagination, he is not the same as the Cobb who is dreaming him. Rather, he is
the one through whom the sleeping Cobb experiences and acts in the dream. He
is the one through whom the dream becomes visible and intelligible to the sleeper.
I can think of no better depiction of Ibn ‘Arabi’s description of the relationship
between the Real (the dreamer), the universe (the dream), and man (the dreamer
in the dream).
There remains one further point of precision: what exactly gives the dream
Cobb his special relationship with the sleeping Cobb? Why doesn’t the dreamer
experience the dream through one of the other characters or projections?
Presumably this is because the dream Cobb is a kind of summary version of the
dreamer: they look similar, feel similarly, and share other defining characteristics.

While other characters may be projections of different aspects of Cobb, the dream
Cobb is the projection of the sleeping Cobb’s very own self. This gives him a
unique relationship to the dream as a whole; because the entire dream is
comprised of projections of his sleeping consciousness, he is a microcosm of the
whole dream.
This, in short, is Ibn ‘Arabi’s description of the special place Man occupies
in the universe. Man is a Small Universe, while the Universe is a Big Man.48
Izutsu explains,
Ibn ‘Arabi calls the world in this particular context the Big Man (al-insān al-kabīr),
i.e. Macrocosm. The most salient feature of the Big Man is that every single existent
in it represents one particular aspect (Name) of God, and one only, so that the whole
thing lacks a clear delineation and a definite articulation, being as it is a loose
conglomeration of discrete points. It is, so to speak, a clouded mirror. In contrast to
this…Man is a well-polished spotless mirror reflecting any object as it really is.
Rather, Man is the polishing itself of this mirror which is called the universe. Those
discrete things and properties that have been diffused and scattered all over the
immense universe become united and unified into a sharp focus in Man. The
structure of the whole universe with all its complicated details is reflected in him in a
clear and distinctly articulated miniature. This is the meaning of being a
microcosm.49
The Andalusian sage also cites the hadith, “God created Adam in His Image,” to
explain this special relationship between Man and the Real.”50
But Man (and the Universe) is not just a mirror of God; God is also the
mirror of Man. Ibn ‘Arabi writes, “He is your mirror for your vision of yourself,
and you are His mirror for His Vision of His Names [His existence in a relational
mode;]—which are none other than Himself….” 51 These two mirrors, when
perfectly aligned, produce the infinitude of reflections which comprise the cosmos.
The discussion above illustrates how Man, the central figure and microcosm of
the dream universe, is the mirror of God, but how is God the mirror of Man?
These two statements are really two sides of the same coin, as Ibn ‘Arabi explains,
You must know that since, as we have said, it [Man/the universe] appears in His
Form, clearly God has arranged that we should, in trying to know Him, resort to
studying creation carefully. Thus He Himself has said [in the Qur’an (41:53)] that he
will show us His signs within it.52 He has shown himself to us through us. We
describe Him by no quality without being that quality53…. When we know him
through ourselves and from ourselves, we attribute everything to Him that we
attribute to ourselves and on this point the divine sayings have come down to us on
the tongues of interpreters. So He described Himself to us through us. When we
witness Him, we witness ourselves, and when He witnesses us, He witnesses
Himself.54
God is the mirror of Man, because we are the mirror of God. When we look for
God, we look to the universe and in ourselves because we reflect Him. So when
we look at God, we see ourselves. Or from another perspective, because we are
made in God’s image, and we are a mirror, God must also be a mirror. Still, there
is something inscrutable and mysterious about the mirror of God. Mirror to
mirror, deep to deep, God’s mystery is reflected in us, rather it is His reflection in
us, and our mystery is reflected in God, and is our reflection in Him. And these
two mysteries are the same. According to another hadith, God has said, “Man is
My secret, and I am his secret.”
This unfathomable mystery, the very limit of human knowledge is
represented in the image of the double mirror by the inscrutable darkness in the
center of each mirror, at either end of the infinite tunnel, which paradoxically
goes no deeper than the surface of either mirror. Or rather, the darkness at the

center of each mirror merely shows the invisibility of the mirror itself. Ibn ‘Arabi
explains,
It is similar to what one finds in a visible mirror: when you see a form in it, you do
not see it [the mirror], although you know that there do you see forms—or your own
form. Now God has manifested this as a similitude, employing it to represent the
self-disclosure of the Essence, so that the object of self-disclosure will know that he
does not see Him. There is no symbol which comes closer to or more closely
resembles this vision and this self-disclosure. When you see a form in a mirror
struggle within yourself to see the body of the mirror; you will, without any doubt,
never see it. Some of those who have grasped the likes of this—concerning forms in
mirrors—have held the position that the visible form comes between the sight of the
onlooker and the mirror…If you have tasted this, you have tasted the goal which, for
the creature, no goal exceeds. Do not entertain any hopes and do not tire your soul in
trying to ascend to something higher than this degree; there is no such thing at all,
and there is nothing after it but pure non-existence.55
Or in the dream language of Inception, the dreamer is always invisible.
Although the dream itself and the dreamer’s representation of himself within the
dream reflect the dreamer in a particularly direct way, they are not the dreamer
himself. Rather, they are like reflections in the mirror of his consciousness. More
concretely, imagine we’re projections in one of Cobb’s dreams. We could get to
know Cobb through the character Cobb in the dream and the other characters
(including ourselves) and features of the dream, which are the sleeping Cobb’s
projections. However, we have no way to find the “real Cobb,” the Cobb that
sleeps and lives outside of the dream. Outside of the dream, we don’t exist. Or,
from another perspective, we would only exist as an aspect of Cobb’s
consciousness, in which case, we would no longer be ourselves. As projections,
all we can know is that aspect of the dreamer we represent, which is simply what
we are. We can only ever know ourselves, and only the dreamer can know
himself. As the Sufis say, “Only God knows God.” We can’t see the mirror of
Cobb’s mind because it is filled with images and forms, all of which, (including
us!) are reflections of him. The mind of the dreamer, like the mirror of the Real,
is invisible because it is filled with reflections of itself which simultaneously
reveal and conceal it. This is the true significance of the double mirror, and
according to Ibn ‘Arabi, the end and goal of human knowledge, beyond which
there is nothing.56
Death as Awakening, Awakening as Death
“You can’t wake up from within a dream unless you die.”

-Arthur
“No room for tourists on a job like this”
-Eames and Saito
We have already seen how the saying, “People are asleep and when they die,
they awaken,” has been used to understand our life in this world as a dream, or
rather, as a dream within a dream, how death in the dream of this life can be seen
as an awakening into the dream of the afterlife. But there is another, more subtle
point derived from this saying, and alluded to at the end of the previous section,
and alluded to by the famous saying of the Prophet, “Die before you die.” What
happens to a character in a dream, a projection when the dreamer awakes? What
a radical transformation must it undergo, from a seemingly independent persona
to an aspect of another’s consciousness. Such a dramatic shift, traversing the

boundaries of the dream, passing from reflection to reality, from form to meaning,
is surely a kind of death. Izutsu explains,
The expression: “to die and wake up” appearing in the Tradition is for Ibn ‘Arabi
nothing other than a metaphorical reference to the act of interpretation understood in
this sense. Thus ‘death’ does not mean here death as a biological event. It means a
spiritual event consisting in a man’s throwing off the shackles of the sense and
reason, stepping over the confines of the phenomenal, and seeing through the web of
phenomenal things what lies beyond. It means, in short, the mystical experience of
‘self-annihilation’ (fanā’).57
As Ibn ‘Arabi frequently reminds his readers, it is important not to confuse the
conceptual understanding this state of affairs with its realization. In terms of the
film, it is one thing to understand that you could be dreaming, it’s quite another to
put the gun to your head. The annihilation of fanā’ is not something you can just
read about; it’s not “for tourists.”58 Fanā’ can only be attained through rigorous
spiritual exercises and the abandonment of all worldly desires for the sake of
drawing closer to God, just as the Prophet recommended, “Die before you die.”
This “death” is a necessary condition of the realization of the reality beyond
the dream, because in the face of this reality, we do not exist. Fanā’ is precisely to
realize our own non-existence in the face of the Real. Ibn ‘Arabi frequently cites
the Qur’anic verse, “All things perish save his face,”59 in explaining this point.
However, this is not the whole story. On one hand, we are nothing in the face of
the Real, but on the other hand, we are nothing but the Real. The positive
realization of our existence as the Real after the realization of our unreality is
known as baqā’ or “subsistence.” This subsistence is often described as the
“annihilation of annihilation,” since the realization of nothingness is itself realized
to be nothing. The perishing of fanā’ itself perishes in the face of the Real.
In the awakening of fanā’, all of the various features of the dream perish
into the mind of the dreamer, and all multiplicity is overwhelmed by unity of the
realization that “everything is just a dream.” Seen in this regard, this awakening
is called “union.” The subsequent awakening of baqā’ is the realization that all
the various features of the dream subsist in the dreamer. Multiplicity and
distinction return, but this time, seen in the unity of the dreamer. In this regard, it
is known as “the union of union” because it unites both unity and multiplicity. In
fanā, unity annihilates multiplicity, whereas in baqā,’ multiplicity is reflected in
unity.
In terms of the symbolism of the double mirror, fanā’ is like the perspective
shift from seeing the infinite reflections in our mirror to “seeing” nothing but the
Real’s invisible mirror. Baqā’ is like the perspective shift of seeing the infinite
reflections again, but this time in the Real’s mirror. Or in terms of the film, fanā’
would be like Ariadne’s first realization that she is dreaming which obliterated the
dream of the Paris street in a fantastic series of explosions. Baqā’ would be like
her return to this dream where she sees everything as a projection, and starts
messing around with its structure by turning a whole block back on itself.60 Only
people who have attained this level of realization can truly reflect the Real, and
act as an extension of the consciousness of the dreamer in the dream. What
separates a projection from the representation of the dreamer in the dream? The

dreamer knows who he really is, and that he is dreaming.61
In this way, we can see how the “death before death” referred to in the two
Prophetic sayings, “die before you die,” and “people are asleep, when they die,
they awaken,” does not just refer to a biological event, but also to a radical
transformation of consciousness, which should take place before the biological
event. “Death” here refers to the death of the everyday consciousness which takes
the world and the self at face value. This death is the pre-requisite for the birth of
the “awake” consciousness which interprets and experiences these various
appearances as reflections of the Real.
Inception / talqīn
“We will show them Our signs on the horizons and in their souls, until it becomes clear to them
that it is the Truth (al-Haqq)”
-Qur’an XLI, 53
“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.”
-Eames
It would be nice, if, as for Ariadne, all it took were an afternoon
conversation in a Parisian café to realize fanā’ and baqā’. However, for most of
us, things are not so simple. Realizing the truth is often a long and complicated
process that involves our emotions and experiences as well as our minds.
Changing the way we experience the world is a serious business, and although it
happens all the time, directing these changes toward a specific goal is the task of a
lifetime. In fact, for Ibn ‘Arabi, this is the task of our lives, or rather it is life
itself. In commenting on the above verse of the Qur’an, Ibn ‘Arabi writes, “And
God most high says, We shall show them our signs on the horizons, which is what
is outside of you, and in their souls, which is your identity, until it becomes clear
to them, that is to the onlooker, that it is al-Haqq (the Truth/the Real), that is by
virtue of you being His image, and of His being your spirit.”62 That is, God will
keep showing us things in the world and in ourselves, until we realize that these
things, the world, and ourselves are nothing but the Real manifesting itself.
Everything we experience in life and everything that we are or will be is nothing
other than this sequence of “signs,” carefully arranged to lead us to the realization
of the Truth.
This is very much like what Cobb’s team does to Fischer, what Cobb did to
Mal, and what Cobb himself goes through throughout the course of the film. In
each of these cases, the subject of inception goes through an elaborate and
individualized process in a dream world or worlds full of symbols, which
eventually leads him or her to some profound realization that has dramatic
consequences. For Fischer, it is the “realization” that his father wanted him to
chart his own course in life, leading to his decision to break up his father’s
company. For Mal, it was the realization that her world wasn’t real, which led to
her suicide. As for Cobb, it was the realization and relinquishing of the
projections of his wife and children as unreal, but we don’t see what happens if
and when he wakes up. As he tells Ariadne in limbo, “There’s something you

should know about me, about inception. An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly
contagious, and the smallest seed of an idea can grow, it can grow to define, or
destroy you.” In Ibn ‘Arabi’s case, the central idea of the Real/unreal imaginal
nature of ourselves and our world is meant to both destroy us in terms of our
unreality, and redefine us in terms of the Real.
If I had to translate “inception” the way it is used in the film into Arabic, I
would use the word talqīn, which is commonly used to refer to both burial and
initiation, and has the literal meaning of “implanting.” The relations in this
semantic web are quite profound, since according to many Islamic scholars
including Ibn ‘Arabi (and as depicted in numerous films such as What Dreams
May Come), while in the grave, our souls undergo a series of imaginal
experiences, which may be blissful or tormenting, that lead us to the realization of
our relation to the Real.63 Furthermore, most religious initiations involve some
kind of symbolic burial or death as a part of the larger process in which symbols
and profound experiences plant a seed whose fruits of meaning gradually ripen
and are revealed as life (and death) unfolds. This, of course, is nothing other than
“inception” as described in the film.
Ibn ‘Arabi came to his unique way of seeing the world through reflecting on
his visions, dreams, and other mystical experiences, which radically changed the
way he lived. In fact, much of his writing is actually an exposition of his spiritual
experiences, aimed at inspiring similar experiences and a similar orientation in his
readers. Inception (both the movie and the process described therein) works
similarly by presenting its subject or us, the audience, with a series of visions,
images, and ideas, all of which work to provoke a certain response and implant a
central notion or orientation. It takes imagination to make someone realize
something because it takes imagination to truly realize something. Rational
argumentation alone rarely does the trick, not least of all because we and the
world in which we live are nothing but imagination.
Imagination and the limits of reason
One of the most interesting and challenging aspects of Ibn ‘Arabi’s work for
modern readers is his critique of reason. As Ibn ‘Arabi is fond of pointing out,
one of the Arabic words for “reason,” ‘aql,64 comes from the verb ‘aqala which
means to “bind” or “fetter.” In this sense, reason is useful in that it allows us to
get a handle on things and deal with them conceptually. However, in doing so,
reason necessarily distorts reality by trying to delimit, define, and “bind” it in its
rational schemas. Reason cannot deal with paradoxes and seeks to resolve
ambiguities into “either/or” relations, while the worlds of imagination are
characterized by the relations of “neither/nor” and “both/and.” But for Ibn ‘Arabi,
reason and imagination are not opposed to each other; rather, they are
complementary. Reason is critical and analytic, while imagination is creative and
synthetic. A balance of both is needed to achieve the correct view of things,

which Ibn ‘Arabi calls “seeing with two eyes.” The eye of reason distinguishes
the real from the unreal, and the eye of imagination sees the images, reflections,
and dreams that make up our world as simultaneously real and unreal. This
formulation is particularly apt, because you need two eyes in order perceive the
third dimension correctly, just as you need both reason and imagination to
understand the metaphysical dimension of the world. With the eye of reason, we
can discriminate things from each other and see the multiplicity of the world, and
with the eye of imagination, we can see the many things as one. Ibn ‘Arabi
argues that in order to understand things properly, we have to see both ways at
once.
In Inception, Eames represents the pole of imagination, while Arthur
represents that of reason. Eames calls Arthur a “stick in the mud,” and during a
gunfight, tells him, “you mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger darling,” before
mysteriously producing a grenade launcher. Their friendly rivalry in the planning
stages of the mission, in which Arthur demands “specificity,” while Eames calls
inception a “subtle art,” teases Arthur for his condescension, and declares, “to
perform Inception, you need imagination,” wonderfully illustrates the creative
tension between imagination and reason. The ensuing fantastical fight scenes and
Arthur’s ingenious (and wonderfully shot), gravity-free “kick” vividly depict the
process of “seeing with both eyes,” of thinking simultaneously inside and beyond
a given dream level. The team’s ability to think both vertically and horizontally,
to “see with both eyes,” is what allows them to navigate the labyrinth of dream
worlds. Similarly, for Ibn ‘Arabi, “seeing with both eyes” is what allows people
to navigate the labyrinth of the imaginal worlds that make up our existence both
before and after death. Unaware of the various levels of reality, the unimaginative
projections are bound to one level of reality and its rules, while with the aid of
imagination, Cobb and his team jump from level to level, bending and breaking
the local laws of logic as they go.
Reason is a tool and like most tools, works best in conjunction with others.
In fact, pure reason has to be coupled with imagination and insight in order to
work at all.65 This fact, and the limitations of reason, can be somewhat difficult
for us to grasp today, because we live in a world that undervalues insight and
imagination, and is simultaneously irrational and corroded by over-rationalization.
Turned against imagination and insight, instead of working in conjunction with
them, modern reason has tried, and then given up on addressing issues it can’t
handle on its own, such as metaphysics, ethics, and teleology. For this reason,
fundamental questions such as “What is real?”, “What is right?”, and “What are
we here for?” are often better engaged by artists (such as filmmakers) than by
scientists and academic philosophers. “Rational” disciplines such as the physical
sciences can tell me about the biochemical component of my love for my family,
but they can’t tell me how I should love them, why I should love them, or what
my love for them actually means; that is, what this love tells me about the Real

and my relationship to it.
Religion in particular is being choked to death by the bonds of restrictive,
narrow, critical reason, and the fact that religion is often criticized for not being
“rational enough” is paradoxically proof of this very point. What modern religion
really lacks is the imagination, not the kind that sees conspiracy theories
everywhere, but the kind capable of thinking vertically, and not just arguing
horizontally, the kind capable of seeing the world as a dream. If contemporary
religious leaders possessed the kind of imagination that animates Ibn ‘Arabi’s
work or Inception, they wouldn’t waste their time arguing about the age of the
world on the basis of religious doctrine, since the whole dream is only “one night”
old anyway, and the apparent features of this dream world only matter insofar as
they can be interpreted back to Reality. Films such as Inception and works like
Ibn ‘Arabi’s can be a wake-up call (excuse the pun) for contemporary religious
thinkers and scholars of religion to reconsider the role of imagination and its
relationship to reason.
Conclusion
Inception is a remarkable and challenging film, and I love it because for me,
it “imaginalizes” many of the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabi, perhaps the most challenging
and remarkable thinker I have ever read. There are many more connections
between the film and the Sufi master’s vast corpus, but in spite of its length, this
essay was not intended to be comprehensive, simply a presentation of Inception
and Ibn ‘Arabi as mirrors in which to contemplate each other. Although the film’s
inspiration probably comes more directly from Jung’s work,66 every time I watch
it, I see another one of Ibn ‘Arabi’s ideas played out in front of me. It seems
God’s “signs on the horizons” can also be reflected on the big screen.
1
See his Meditations in First Philosophy. Remarkably similar skeptical arguments were advanced
centuries and even millennia before Descartes by figures such as al-Ghazali, Chuang Tzu, and
whole schools of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. These thinkers came to markedly different
conclusions from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” which could be summarized as “I think,
therefore, God is,” “Is the I that I think I am really I?,” “I AM, therefore, i think,” and “‘I,’
‘thinking,’ ‘therefore,’ and ‘being’ are empty conceptual constructs.”
2
This device features prominently in ancient Sanskrit works such as the Panchatantra and
Mahabharata, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedo, and many of Shakespeare’s plays such as Hamlet,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Taming of the Shrew, all of which assume a similar kind of
worldview and take up similar issues of reality/illusion particularly suited to this device.
3
Trans. in Chittick, William. Sufi Path of Knowledge : Ibn ‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination.
(New York: SUNY Press, 1989), 119.
4
To be more precise, khayāl has three meanings: 1) everything which is not the Absolute Reality,
2) the human faculty which joins sensory forms to pure ideas, and 3) a specific level of reality
experienced in veridical dreams and visions, between the physical and spiritual levels of reality
(although these levels are both considered part of khayāl in the first sense). This third meaning of
khayāl is an objective world more real than the physical but less real than the spiritual, and serves
as the bridge between the two. It is the realm of mystical visions and spiritual experiences, where
“spirits are embodied,” as in the vision of an angel in human form, and “bodies are spiritualized,”
as in the sensory experiences that occur after death. This level of reality is the one to which Ibn
‘Arabi is refers to by “Presence of Imagination” in the quote above, but for the purposes of this
paper, I will not get into detailed discussion of this level of reality. Throughout the paper, I
primarily use “imagination” and “imaginal world” to refer khayāl in the first sense, and “imaginal
faculty” for the second.
5
Trans. in Toshihiko Izutsu Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical
Concepts. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 7.
6
This perspective shift provides a compelling refutation of solipsism. From this point of view, the
solipsist’s fallacy lies in his failure to apply his skeptical argument to his apparent self. Just as the
appearance of the external world and its various things are not proof of their reality, neither is the
appearance of the mind and its various mental states, which although more immediate than the
seemingly external world, are not as immediate as Pure Consciousness. I only seem to have direct
access to my mental states, much as I only seem to have direct access to the external world.

Inception and Ibn &#39;Arabi

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Inception and Ibn &#39;Arabi

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Journal of Religion & Film, Vol. 17 [2013], Iss. 2, Art.

laws of the dream technology don’t seem to be consistent. This is to be expected,

depicted in the movie to be Cobb’s dream.

Khayāl-The World of Creative Imagination

illustrates beautifully, is a term called khayāl, which scholars translate as

“imagination” or “imaginal faculty” to separate it from the illusory or derogatory

connotations of the word “imaginary.” The world of khayāl is imaginary in that it

sensations out of physical stimuli. We don’t see electromagnetic radiation with a

which we live, simultaneously creating and perceiving these experiences, much

realities or archetypes. If you’ve ever written a melody or a poem, or drawn a

Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2013 7

the Sufi master writes,

Absolute Reality.” Instead, the relationship between imagination and Reality is

God, Real and unreal.7

This fundamental paradox of identity is the mother of the other

contradictions allowed by imagination. Logical and rational impossibilities are

quality and quantity. Ibn ‘Arabi writes,

Imagination is neither existent nor non-existent, neither known, nor unknown,

Interestingly, however, Ibn ‘Arabi doesn’t despair of ever escaping this

interpreted to understand their origin and significance. Inception illustrates this

Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2013 9

complementary arcs of ascent and descent to and from reality:

Interpretation, ta’wīl, Imagination, khayāl,

So for Ibn ‘Arabi, everything in the world is a symbol, a reflection or “projection”

worlds of Inception are populated by projections of the dreamer, the imaginal

calls tajālliyāt, self-manifestations or self-disclosures, of the Real. Each illusory

appearance in the world is, in truth, a projection, an appearance of the Real. He

Reality itself.” 10 Just as a dream is nothing but a mode of the dreamer’s

The Hierarchy of Reality and Interpretation

“Because it’s never just a dream, is it?”

This concept of interpretation implies the existence of multiple levels of

being due to Yusuf’s driving. It is significant, even if accidental, that this

Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2013 11

‘Arabi clarifies the meaning of this last sentence:

However, given his understanding of imagination, Ibn ‘Arabi asserts that

manifesting itself in different modes or levels of imagination. Given that both

dream; but unbeknownst to him, he is still dreaming. Al-Kāshānī, a prominent

commentator on Ibn ‘Arabi explains:

The difference between Muhammad and Joseph in regard to the depth of

sensible without exception, for imagination (khayal) is a treasury of the sensible

levels of the dream.

Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2013 13

experts on Ibn ‘Arabi,

The music in Inception illustrates these correspondences beautifully through

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVkQ0C4qDvM). The discerning listener

“soundtrack” of sensible forms that constitute his life.18

In the Sufi tradition, music is understood to recall man back to his

described in the Qur’an: 1) the “call-and-response” covenant of alast (7:172) in

hand, And Eternity in an hour.”

This temporal aspect brings us to another feature shared by Inception and

Islamic cosmology (and most traditional cosmologies in general). In the film,

Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2013 15

within dreams. All of this is reminiscent of the Biblical, “A thousand years in

Inception also brilliantly illustrates the close association between death,

resurrection and awakening alluded to above. The almost-apocalyptic scenes of

levels of Inception illustrate a fundamental aspect of Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrine of the

the impressions of sense-intuition and the storehouses of imagination.”23 That is,

dream levels of Inception.

Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, 2013 17

symbolic web of correspondences between levels of reality in Ibn ‘Arabi’s

the legacy of the departed.

Choose to be here. Choose me.”

“So certain of your world. Of what's real…No creeping doubts?”

ambiguities, contradictions, and mystery of imagination on which the film is

Inception and Ibn 'Arabi

Inception and Ibn 'Arabi